The Incestuous Green Blob
Introduction
Back in March, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee produced a report on long-duration energy storage (LDES). This report urged the Government to “get on with it.” Among its key recommendations were to ask the Government to “support no-regrets investments for hydrogen.”
However, some of the members of the committee have significant conflicts of interest and incestuous relationships that call into question the objectivity of the report and the integrity of Government.
What did the Lords LDES Report Say?
The Executive Summary of the report talks about “cheap” renewables and insists the prize for investing in storage is that the electricity system will be cheaper. We do not need to rehearse all the arguments against this statement again. It is sufficient to note that all existing renewables, whether funded by Contracts for Difference (CfDs), Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs) or Feed-In-Tariffs (FiTs) are currently more expensive than gas-fired electricity, as most recently discussed here.
A grid that is solely or mostly powered by renewables will therefore be more expensive than a gas-fired grid. However, as wind and solar power are intermittent in nature, they require some sort of backup or storage to ensure that the grid can always meet demand. Adding storage adds extra capital costs to the system but does not increase the amount of electricity generated. This extra expenditure must therefore increase the full system costs of electricity. So, the opening premise of their report is wrong, calling into question the rest of their analysis.
They then go on to quote extensively from the Royal Society report on long term storage (dismantled here) which farcically suggested the system cost of a renewables plus hydrogen storage grid would be ~£60/MWh. However, this cost is less than half what we pay for renewables alone today and much lower than the prices being offered in AR6. The required electrolysers, storage caverns and generators will not come cheap and will further increase the system cost of electricity. It is likely that the true costs of a renewables plus hydrogen grid will be three or four times that suggested.
How Did the Lords Get it so Wrong?
It is worrying that such an eminent committee should get things so wrong. To understand how and why they made such a glaring error, we need to look at the composition of the committee.
Baroness Brown of Cambridge chairs the Lords Science and Technology Committee. Her register of interests shows she is also the chair of the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). By pure coincidence, Baroness Brown is also a non-executive director of Ceres Power Holdings which describes itself as a leading developer of “electrolysis for the creation of green hydrogen and fuel cells for power generation”. Baroness Brown’s other interests include chairing the Carbon Trust and she is also a non-executive director of wind farm operator and developer Ørsted.
Seen in this context, it becomes easier to see why the LDES report is so enthusiastic about renewables and securing spending on hydrogen storage.
However, the web of relationships runs even wider. Professor Keith Bell acted as Specialist Advisor to the committee in the production of the LDES report. Professor Bell is also a member of the CCC having taken up the position of power sector specialist in 2019 and recently had his contract extended to April 2025.
Incestuous Links to Government
Baroness Brown also has strong links to the new Head of Mission Control at DESNZ, Chris Stark. After leaving his position as Chief Executive of the CCC, Stark was appointed as Chief Executive of the Carbon Trust, which is chaired by Baroness Brown. Mr. Stark is also listed as Baroness Brown’s staffer on the House of Lords website.
One wonders if it is appropriate for one of the most senior people responsible for decarbonising the grid by 2030 should be a staffer for a Baroness and have such a close relationship with someone with such obvious vested interests in wind power and hydrogen.
We can see that the tentacles of the green blob have extended deep into the heart of the establishment and Government. One might term this situation a two-tier system of ethics. The extensive web of commercial interests and personal relationships makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the recommendations of the Lords Science and Technology Committee report on long term energy storage are tainted. It is also difficult to take seriously any recommendations made by the Climate Change Committee and the new Head of Mission Control. It’s so incestuous, seriously someone should check their hands and feet for extra digits.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-144503629
***************************************************The Economic Folly of a ‘Carbon’ Tax
The push for a ‘carbon’ tax has regained popularity as the fiscal storm in 2025 and ‘climate change’ debates intensify
Advocates claim it’s a solution to pay for spending excesses while reducing ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. But a ‘carbon’ tax is a misguided, costly policy that must be rejected.
A ‘carbon’ tax functions more like an income tax than a consumption tax, capturing all forms of work, including capital goods production and building construction.
These sectors are heavy on ‘carbon’ emissions, meaning the tax disproportionately burdens them, stifling investment and innovation — much like a progressive income tax, but with broader economic repercussions.
For example, in the US, the construction sector alone accounts for about 40 percent of ‘carbon’ emissions. A ‘carbon’ tax would heavily penalize this industry, reducing its capacity to grow, generate new housing, and create jobs.
Moreover, implementing a ‘carbon’ tax involves massive administrative costs. The federal tax code is already complex and costly; a ‘carbon’ tax would exacerbate these issues.
Determining net ‘carbon’ emissions is a nuanced process subject to ever-changing and arbitrary federal definitions, increasing compliance costs for businesses and consumers.
A study by the Tax Foundation found that a ‘carbon’ tax would cost billions of dollars annually in administrative costs, a burden that would ultimately fall on consumers through higher prices, less economic activity, and fewer jobs.
The US economy is already suffering from regulatory costs of $3 trillion annually, including many energy-related restrictions, and the Biden administration has added more than $1.6 trillion in regulatory costs since taking office.
One core principle of free-market capitalism is that it comes with limited government. A ‘carbon’ tax contradicts this principle by expanding governmental regulation of everyday economic activities.
The tax revenues would also enable further overspending, though that’s questionable given the supposed purpose of the tax is to reduce ‘carbon’ emissions and, therefore, the taxes collected.
Furthermore, a ‘carbon’ tax could favor certain production methods over others, disrupting the level playing field that free markets thrive on and leading to inefficiencies and market distortions.
The government picks winners and losers by favoring specific methods, undermining competition and economic growth. ‘Renewable’ energy projects are likely to receive preferential political treatment, skewing investments away from the market’s more efficient, practical technologies.
Pigouvian taxes, aimed at correcting negative externalities, are often cited to support a ‘carbon’ tax. These taxes are named after economist Arthur Pigou and are designed to correct the negative effects of externalities by imposing costs equivalent to the external damage.
But they can be counterproductive as they are bound to be the wrong tax rate, distorting economic activity.
‘Carbon’ taxes fail to account for complex economic interactions and unintended consequences. The PROVE It Act, for instance, proposes a new ‘carbon’ tax framework but lacks a clear, consistent, and scientifically sound basis for implementation.
This uncertainty raises the stakes for economic disruption and consumer cost increases.
Another critical issue in the ‘carbon’ tax debate is ‘who decides?’
Climate science is ever evolving, and economic models predicting the outcomes of ‘carbon’ taxes are fraught with uncertainties. Placing high costs on consumers based on unsettled science and unpredictable economic impacts is not a prudent policy approach.
We should promote voluntary measures and technological advancements that naturally reduce emissions through market activity.
Importantly, the EPA does not consider carbon dioxide a harmful pollutant in the traditional sense, as it is essential for life.
We need carbon dioxide to breathe and enjoy a fulfilling life. This further questions the rationale behind taxing ‘carbon’ emissions, as it imposes undue economic strain in an attempt to regulate a naturally occurring and necessary element.
Even if America hadn’t been doing better than other countries that joined the Paris Treaty for goals on ‘carbon’ emissions, China (and India) aren’t interested, thereby putting more of the unnecessary cost of reducing these emissions on Americans.
Moreover, the cost of ‘carbon’ taxes can be significant. Increasing production costs leads to higher prices for goods and services, disproportionately affecting low- and middle-income households — especially when they already suffer from high inflation.
This regressive nature undermines its purported environmental benefits, placing a heavier burden on those least able to afford it. For example, a $50-per-ton ‘carbon’ tax could increase household energy costs by up to $300 annually, hitting hardest those who can least afford it.
Countries implementing ‘carbon’ taxes, like some in Europe, have seen mixed results. Emissions reductions have been minimal, while economic growth has been hampered.
These policies often result in job losses and decreased global competitiveness, showcasing the unintended consequences of such interventions. For instance, France’s ‘carbon’ tax led to widespread protests and economic disruption, illustrating such policies’ social and economic challenges.
While the intention behind a ‘carbon’ tax — to reduce American ‘GHG’ emissions in an effort to combat global ‘climate change’ — is questionable in itself, the economic realities and principles of free-market economics prove it is a flawed approach.
With the fiscal storm likely coming next year, Congress should just say no to the PROVE It Act and the ‘carbon’ tax in general.
The bottom line is that increasing the government’s footprint through such a tax is neither conservative nor market-oriented. Instead, we should focus on market-driven solutions that encourage innovation and efficiency without imposing heavy-handed regulations.
https://principia-scientific.com/the-economic-folly-of-a-carbon-tax/
*******************************************************Who Is Directing the War on Agriculture and Nutrition?
By Paul Driessen
Elite billionaire organizations and foundations, government agencies and activist pressure groups are funding and coordinating a global war on modern agriculture, nutrition, and Earth’s poorest, hungriest people. Instead of helping more families get nutritious food, better healthcare and higher living standards, they’re doing the opposite, and harming biodiversity in the process.
The World Economic Forum wants to reimagine, reinvent and transform the global food system, to eliminate greenhouse gases from food production. Central to its plan is alternatives to animal protein: meal worm potato chips, bug burgers instead of beef patties, and meat loaves and sausages made from lake flies, for instance. Fixing the WEF’s toxic workplace is apparently a low priority.
A UN Food and Agriculture Organization report advises that turning “edible insects” into “tasty” food products can create thriving local businesses and even promote “inclusion of women.”
Created to alleviate global poverty, the World Bank has decided the “manmade climate crisis” is a far greater threat to impoverished families than contaminated water, malaria and other killer diseases, hunger, or even two billion people still burning wood and dung because they don’t have reliable, affordable electricity. It has unilaterally decreed that 45% of its funds – an extra $9 billion in FY2024 – will be shifted to helping the poor “better withstand the devastation of climate change.”
(The Bank has also decided that even more of its taxpayer funding – $300-million instead of “only” $70-million – should be gifted to the Palestinian Authority, which pays terrorists to murder Israelis.)
Of course, most of the better and lesser-known environmental pressure groups are also deeply involved in food, agriculture and energy policy campaigns: Greenpeace, Sierra Club, EarthJustice, Friends of the Earth, Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way), Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, and countless others.
Like the rest of the “agro-ecology” movement, they deride and malign modern agriculture as a scourge inflicted by greedy mega-corporations. They oppose fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides and biotechnology. They extol “food sovereignty” and the “right to choose.” But their policies reflect top-down tyranny and bullying, with little room for poor farmers to embrace modern agricultural technologies and practices.
In addition to WEF, FAO and World Bank support, these hard-green organizations have the ideological, organizational and financial backing of the US Agency for International Development, EU agencies, and a host of progressive and far-left American, European and other foundations.
The US-based AgroEcology Fund was created by the Christensen Fund, New Fields Foundation and Swift Foundation. Its funding and programs are overseen by the New Venture Fund, which helps “charitable” and “educational” organizations direct funds to programs that align with what many characterize as neo-colonialist and eco-imperialist goals.
Other major players include the Schmidt Family Foundation, Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Ben and Jerry Foundation.
This is serious money – hundreds of millions of dollars per year in food, agriculture and climate change funding. It completely overshadows the piddling $9,000 that Kenyan farmer Jusper Machogu raised via donations to his “climate realism” website – much of it given to neighbors, so they could drill water wells, buy tanks of propane or get connected to the local grid.
And yet Mr. Machogu incurred the wrath of the BBC’s “Climate Disinformation Officer.” (Yes, the Beeb actually has such a position.) The CDO attacked him for “tweeting false and misleading claims” about climate change and saying Africa should develop its oil, gas and coal reserves – instead of relying entirely on intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar. Even worse, the farmer had the temerity to accept donations from non-Africans, including “individuals with links to the fossil fuel industry and groups known for promoting climate change denial.”
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is another major donor to agro-ecology outfits. It’s part of the legacy of guilt-ridden oil money from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. corporate trust – an inheritance that includes nearly 1,000 climate-related institutions, foundations and activist organizations.
As Canada’s Frontier Centre put it, “Every time you hear a ‘climate change’ scare story, [the person writing it] was PAID. He is a Rockefeller stooge. He may not know it, but his profession has been entirely corrupted.” Far worse, I would add, the writer and his (or her) organization are complicit in perpetuating global poverty, energy deprivation, hunger, disease and death – because the fearmongering drives destructive energy and food production policies.
Alone or collectively, these policy corrupters must not be underestimated in this war to preserve and expand modern energy, agriculture and global nutrition. Thankfully, there is increasing pushback. Many families simply do not want to be trapped in poverty, disease, mud-and-thatch huts, an absence of educational opportunities for their children, and a future of backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk labor in little subsistence-farming fields.
That’s especially so when films, news stories and cell phones present American and European farming equipment and practices – and the crop yields, wealth, health, homes, leisure time and opportunities that accompany those modern agricultural systems.
Poor farmers also see China, India, Indonesia and other countries rapidly industrializing and modernizing by using oil, gas and coal. They see rumblings of change in many countries that are intent on charting their own courses, with fossil fuels as the energy foundation for that growth. They’re rejecting the eco-colonialism and eco-imperialism that wealthy Westerners seek to impose on them.
They are getting the message that humanity has faced climate fluctuations and extreme weather events throughout history … and survived them, dealt with them, adapted to them, prospered. That there is no real-world evidence that manmade greenhouse gas emissions – especially the trivial amounts generated by agriculture – have replaced the powerful natural forces that caused past climate changes.
They increasingly realize that organic and subsistence farming requires vastly more land – which would otherwise be wildlife habitats – than modern mechanized farming, to get the same yields. Plowing those habitats would decimate plant and animal diversity.
That locking up fossil fuels, and relying instead on biofuels and plant-based feed stocks for thousands of essential products, would require even more acreage. So would mining for massive amounts of metals and minerals to manufacture wind, solar and battery technologies.
Most importantly, they understand that humanity today has far greater wealth, far more knowledge, far better technologies and resources than any past generations.
To suggest that we cannot adapt to climate changes, or survive and recover from extreme weather events, is simply absurd. To suggest that farmers should revert to … or remain stuck in … ancient farming practices and technologies – to save the world from computer-generated manmade climate disasters – is eco-imperialism at its most lethal.
South Africa’s electricity minister recently said his country will not be “turned into a guinea pig for a worldwide Green New Deal.” Hopefully, all developing countries will soon apply that same attitude to anarchists who would use the world’s poor as guinea pigs in global agricultural and nutrition experiments.
https://heartland.org/opinion/who-is-directing-the-war-on-agriculture-and-nutrition/
*****************************************************Australian Greenie antisemitism
Police were called to a Sydney council chambers on Tuesday night after a Greens-led pro-Palestine protest turned ugly, forcing the abandonment of the meeting amid safety concerns after Jewish speakers were targeted, before officers escorted out staff and councillors.
The protest, co-organised by Inner West Greens councillor Dylan Griffiths, had been weeks in the making and designed to whip up frenzied support for his Boycott, Divest, Sanction motion, described previously as a “campaign ploy” before September’s local government elections.
It comes after Anthony Albanese’s criticism of the party’s inflammatory rhetoric, and The Australian’s special report, ‘Greens Extremes’ which revealed how its grassroots members had prioritised “revolution” over rates, roads and rubbish at a council level.
About 100 protesters took to the Inner West council’s final pre-election meeting on Tuesday in Ashfield, which was adjourned three times due to the partisan crowd, before eventually being abandoned.
Decked in keffiyehs, speakers – all of whom were allowed to speak by Labor mayor Darcy Byrne, a break in protocol in an olive-branch move – included those behind the Prime Minister’s electorate office picket, and hurled epithets including “baby killers” and “Nazis” toward Labor councillors, and claimed that they were paid “blood money” and had “sold their soul to Zionists”.
The mayor was forced to abandon the five-hour-long meeting about 11pm after the motion, which sought to investigate cutting council’s ties companies or products associated with Israel, was voted down, prompting pro-Palestine chanting of “river to the sea”, shouts of “shame”, and swear words.
Labor’s eight councillors, including the mayor, who voted against the motion, were forced to stay in chambers – as were council staff and elected colleagues – before the police arrived and escorted them out to their cars, given safety concerns with the large and angry crowd.
One pro-Palestine activist rubbished concerns and the experience of anti-Semitism described by one Jewish resident who spoke against the motion, before she then evoked the mayor’s deceased parents, which drew an emotional call to order by a taken aback Mr Byrne.
The few speakers who spoke against the motion, understood to all be Jewish residents, were booed by members of the gallery and one was called “Ms Netanyahu” for saying that while she supported Palestine she felt a BDS policy would worsen local social cohesion.
Others waved Palestine flags in the faces of Jewish residents speaking against the motion while some gallery members made a triangle symbol with their hands, eyewitnesses alleged, which is often associated with Hamas’ inverted triangle symbol.
On Wednesday, Mr Byrne said the actions and behaviour of the gallery, and organising group Inner West 4 Palestine, were “extreme”.
“The intimidating and abusive conduct of this group was unsafe, dangerous and undemocratic,” he said.
“The harassment and abuse of Jewish citizens who attended the meeting was appalling and completely unacceptable.
“There is no place for racism or religious vilification of any group in the Inner West.
“Overrunning the council chamber and preventing democratic decision making from taking place is not a political tactic that should be normalised in Australia.”
It had been the longest public gallery in the history of the council and the BDS motion meant council’s anti-racism strategy was unable to be discussed or voted on.
The Greens’ new slate of candidates for September’s election were also involved, pictured seated in the front row as activists hurled abuse at councillors.
ALP insiders have previously said the Greens would routinely stoke tensions and encourage targeting of electorate offices and other forums, like seen at Inner West Council, before wiping their hands clean of any responsibility.
“They go ‘That’s nothing to do with us, we had no idea’,” one Labor source said.
It was a full-circle moment for the Inner West after Marrickville Council, which now makes up part of the Local Government Area, introduced its own BDS policy in 2011, but later revoked it after uproar.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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